Even though Veterans Day passed on Nov. 11, for Michael Wewerka, a man not yet 40, Veterans Day is really every day. Especially those days that he has the opportunity to look deeply into the eyes of men twice his age who have fought, and killed, and sorrowed, and have come home to live out their lives… with those memories never far away.

Michael Wewerka is a photographer. But he is also a son of a man who served in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner. That fact would not become relevant until decades later, but for the past year it has served as the inspiration for a project that has consumed Wewerka.

The Vietnam Veteran Portrait Project is an ambitious “voyage of discovery” for both photographer Wewerka and the men whose portraits he is making as a tribute to their service. The large, 16”x 20” color images of men in their 70s and 80s will be on display at Railroad Square’s Southern Exposure Art Gallery, opening Dec. 1.

Wewerka, who is quietly articulate and certainly passionate about his current project, had always been drawn to making pictures of one kind or another. “I loved drawing… like many boys, I thought I’d like to be an animator, creating heroes doing amazing things.”

His father, a talented amateur photographer, had enjoyed taking pictures and young Wewerka was mildly fascinated with the little Fisher-Price Kodak camera he’d gotten as a gift. But it wasn’t until years later when at Ringling School of Art and Design that a friend for whom he was a modeling subject, showed him around her photographic dark room. “Suddenly, I was hooked,” he says. Besides, he’d decided drawing animations would have been more like “factory work.”

Self portrait of photographer Mike Wewerka who took the shots of Vietnam veterans.(Photo: Mike Wewerka)

Switched to graphic design, Wewerka was immediately employable after graduation. And has been honing that much-in-demand talent ever since. Now Senior Graphics Designer for Flower Foods in Thomasville, Wewerka creates logos, ads, websites, digital and print advertising of all kinds for the likes of Wonder Bread, Nature’s Own and Dave’s Bread. And he experiments.

As anyone who has ever played with PhotoShop knows, the possibilities seem endless. Creativity is at the tips of your fingers with a click. But Wewerka has become a master. Now an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop with his work published in professional magazines like Digital Foto, which he calls the foremost European photographic publication and the book, Mastering the Nikon D7100, Wewerka also gives group and private lessons in Photoshop, Lightroom, and the basics of good composition and camera handling.

But he wanted a project. Something that would focus his creative and his technical skills. Weweka didn’t know it would lie so close to home.

He recalled that as a young boy he had seen a photo of his father in military uniform holding a pistol. “I’d asked him, since all little boys are somehow curious about such things… if he’d ever killed anyone.” His father had said no, but years later, now speaking as two grown men, Wewerka had asked the question again. This time his father’s truthful answer was, “I’ve probably killed more people than I can recall. When you’re in a helicopter firing down on people… you just do your duty.” ‘And don’t let yourself think’ was what Wewerka thought his father’s answer implied.

John Petriello is featured in the Vietnam Veteran Portrait Project opening Dec. 1(Photo: Mike Wewerka)

That understanding, how old men, once young, had suppressed the experience of war, how they had sublimated it, sometimes to their own detriment, began to gnaw at Michael Wewerka.

He read of the Vietnam veteran’s homecomings that turned derisive. Of the shrugs, the insults, the protests, and how the men who thought they were doing their duty as their own fathers had, had often come home to be despised. And as a photographer, Wewerka figured he had a kind of tool to bring honor to those who had served, even if it would be belated.

In collaboration with Joe West, a veteran and member of the Vietnam Veterans Association, Wewerka met with six men from VVA 96 at the American Legion Post at Lake Ella. “I took four or five shots of each of them dressed in Army surplus fatigues. The shots are in color. They are beautifully printed by Gandy Printers whose owner is also a Vietnam vet. And they are doing the work without charge.”

The technical skills used to make the painterly, starkly beautiful portraits of aging men with aging skin are complex. But the result, which takes approximately three hours per image to create, is direct and the impact powerful. Others seem to agree.

“I’ve just been invited to a large veterans’ meeting in Orlando in March. There are 10,000 members. They would like me to do there what I’ve done here. And I will try,” says Wewerka. “I would like to provide a free portrait of each veteran who desires it, a portrait that tells his story. It will be an honor to honor those who might have missed it the first time around.”